Thursday, November 29, 2012

I have just learned, from a comment on Steven Goddard's Real Science site, that climate scientists have announced a new value of the average surface temperature on Earth, of 14°C. This, however, amounts to an unjustified and unauthorized trashing of the Standard Atmosphere model, which has for a century or more given 15°C as that average surface temperature.
Anyone who has read my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison, which uses the Standard Atmosphere model, knows that model is precisely confirmed by that analysis. There is no room for an arbitrary change in the mean surface temperature by even that 1°C now being arbitrarily claimed by climate scientists.
I have, in the past two years, made the comment on a few sites that the mean surface temperature in the Standard Atmosphere model, which my analysis confirmed, is warmer than that propounded by today's climate scientists, even after a century of supposed global warming. It is utterly clear to me that they could not deal with such a trenchant criticism of their fraudulent theory of global warming. So they deny the Standard Atmosphere, hoping that thereby no one can anymore embarrass them with it, and hoping also that my confirmation of the Standard Atmosphere, and definitive disproof of their theory, will go away.
It will not -- ever. Climate scientists have all doomed themselves, not the Earth.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Hurricane Sandy has caused much discussion on all the climate blogs I have visited lately, such as climate etc. The continuing question -- already considered answered in the affirmative by climate alarmists -- is whether Sandy was somehow due to global warming. Here is my short response:
What is the effect, upon the available atmospheric energy, of a change of about 1°C of global warming over the last century? The equipartition theorem tells us that the molecular energy is proportional to the absolute (Kelvin) temperature, so the fractional change in energy is equal to the fractional change in temperature, or 1°/T, with T the average temperature of the lower atmosphere. The mass mean temperature of the troposphere in the Standard Atmosphere model (which I confirmed in my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison) is 259.4K. So an increase of 1°C, or 1K, in the mean temperature means a fractional increase in the available energy of 1/259.4, or about 0.004.
If we define a hurricane by a representative wind velocity within it, then the energy in the storm should vary as the square of that velocity. Suppose we have a hurricane defined by a 75 mph windspeed; the square of that is 5625. Now raising the temperature by 1°C should increase the energy to 1.004 its former value -- 1.004 times 5625 = 5647.5, and the square-root of that, 75.15, would be the new wind velocity expected for the storm. But distinguishing a storm with 75 mph winds from one with 75.15 mph winds, in my estimation at least, is not possible (this estimate of the effect is rough, of course, but it is certainly within an order of magnitude, and if the effect were ten times larger, we would still be looking at trying to distinguish 76.5 mph winds from 75 mph ones). So we shouldn't expect to see any increase in hurricane intensities, or destructive power, on average, with only a 1°C rise in global temperature.
And if we look at the tropical storm and hurricane data, from 1851 to the present, at this site, we can find and plot the average intensity of all tropical storms (including those that became hurricane force) over that time period:

The horizontal black line in the above image is the best fit linear trend line. It has a slope of -0.0006/decade, or essentially zero. There has in fact been no observable increase in average atlantic storm strength, over the range of the data. (In the above graph, the decadal average strength of all atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes is calculated according to the hurricane categories, 1 to 5, and each tropical storm taken as a category zero.) This is not the whole story, of course, but in my view it is the bottom line conclusion to be drawn from the data, as well as from the simple theoretical estimate above.